Shoes wonderful shoes

Posted on August 16, 2011 by Sam van de Geer

Shoes Wonderful Shoes

Aimee and I spent the other day at the Museums Resource Centre looking at our shoe collection.  We discovered a massive hoard of parts of leather shoes found in a ditch at the Oxford Castle, a great project for an archaeological research group to explore at some point in the future.  Then we rediscovered this child’s shoe found in a Late Roman Well at Barton Court Farm, Abingdon.  Only 13.5cm long and 6cm wide it is the right shoe, with moccasin style vamp, a stitched on sole and stiched with thongs.  This lovely objects was conserved in 2000.  A historic treatment possibly with excessive amounts of neats foot oil had left the shoe as a sticky dark mass (see attached image).  This sticky treatment was painstakingly removed with Alcosol D70 (white spirit substitute) and then the shoe parts were reconstructed with dyed japanese tissue and silk crepline.

Shoe with historic treatment before resent conservation

Roman shoe, shiney from historic conservation treatment and before removal of historic treatment and reconstruction

Romano-British child shoe found in a Late Roman well at Barton Court Farm, Abingdon

About Sam van de Geer

I am a social history conservator and have worked at the Museums Resource Centre for 13 years. I'm appointed on this project as the Organic Conservator and responsible for training, web presence of the collections and conservation for the exhibition at The Oxfordshire Museum. This project is an exciting oppurtunity to focus on a specifc area of the collection that relates to oxfordshire and to forge links with all the partnership museums and historical institutions involved. My expertise with the Oxfordshire County Council textile collection has developed during this time and with the help of 11 volunteers the textile collections care has improved greatly.
This entry was posted in MRC Collection. Bookmark the permalink.